An Open Door New Travel Writing for a Precarious Century

This shift is timely: the severing of Britain from the European Union asks questions of Wales about its relationship to its own past, to the British state, to Europe and beyond, while the present political, public health, and environmental crises mean that travel writing can and should never again be the comfortably escapist genre that it was. Our modern anxieties over identity are registered here in writing that questions in a personal, visceral way the meaning of belonging and homecoming, and reflects a search for stability and solace as much as a desire for adventure. Here are lyrical stories refracted through kaleidoscopes of family and world history, alongside accounts of forced displacement and the tenacious love that exists between people and places. Yet these pieces also show the enduring value and joy of travel itself. Taken together, the stories of An Open Door extend Jan Morris’ legacy into a turbulent present and even more uncertain future. Whether seen from Llyn or the Somali desert, we still take turns to look out at the same stars, and it might be this recognition, above all, that encourages us to hold the door open for as long as we can.

Steven Lovatt is the author of Birdsong in a Time of Silence (Particular Books, 2021), and over the last decade his critical articles on Welsh literature, particularly Dorothy Edwards and Margiad Evans, have been published in New Welsh Review, Planet, Critical Survey, the AWWE Yearbook and the Literary Encyclopaedia. He reviews poetry for The Friday Poem, teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Bristol, and copy-edits books on ethnography and philosophy from his home in Swansea